Posts in "Health Care"

Some of you may have come across this Facebook status in some form or another yesterday:

No one should die because they cannot afford health care. No one should go broke because they get sick, and no one should be tied to a job because of a pre-existing condition. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.

How do freedom-lovers like us respond to that kind of statement? Surely none of us would want people to die simply because they lack wealth or had the bad luck of having a pre-existing condition.

John Thorlin at The New Madisonian offers a good answer (after the jump). I suggest that we respond with our own viral Facebook status. Anyone have any good suggestions?

At least it's starting to look that way. Perhaps this will wake the left up to the fact that their God-King is willing to put principle behind politics and pragmatism on just about everything -- even on this one domestic issue the left considers paramount.

Anyway, this is a great victory for liberty, but we need to take down any awful "compromise" proposal as well.

Borrowing President Obama's already-borrowed slogan, "Yes We Can." But in order to do it, we need to be active in our opposition. Like all of mankind, politicians act primarily to enrich and advance themselves and their loved ones. When one is immersed in the corrupt apparatus of the state, this human proclivity leads to especially unsavory practices. Thus, we see politicians vote to help wealthy special interests, or vote to advance themselves within their party, regardless of what is right or wrong. A majority certainly will vote to support the health care bill and appease the special interests therein should we stand idle.

But as the demise of the 2007 amnesty bill showed, elected officials do respond to avid grassroots sentiment. Many of these guys are career politicians, and exclusively rely on the state for their salaries. They WILL NOT support a bill they believe would seriously jeopardize their jobs and their lavish, coercively obtained "perks."

Which is why we must stand up and fight. Try to get out to your nearest town hall meeting and vocally condemn this awful bill. And most importantly, promise to oppose any politician who supports it.

By contrast, the words "marketplace" and "competition" are used 3 times each.

By contrast, the NTU finds that in his speeches, Obama uses positive words like "choice," "competition," and "marketplace" more than five times as often as negative words like "tax," "regulate," and "restrict."

John Stossel recently did a masterful investigation on "Universal Healthcare" for ABC News. Among other details, he found that 1.7 million Canadians don't even have access to a family doctor in their "universal healthcare" system. Like all socialist schemes, the uncontrollable cost has led to extensive rationing and shortages.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Canada. But does anyone really want to wait 23 hours in the emergency room?

The Director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf, testified before the Senate today, saying that the proposed health care legislation would drive us further into debt (duh). And what did Congressional Democrats do?

Asked about the testimony by Mr. Elmendorf, a highly regarded economist, Mr. Reid snapped derisively, “Maybe what he should do is run for Congress.”

“In the legislation that has been reported, we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount. And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health-care costs.”

I'm not sure what Reid is trying to do here. The CBO is supposed to give honest, accurate representations of what legislation will do to the national budget and debt. Reid and Pelosi are angry that the facts don't support their conclusion. What does Reid want the CBO to do: make up numbers?

Adam Savage from Mythbusters once said, "I reject your reality... and substitute my own." At least he was joking.

Chidem Kurdas over at ThinkMarkets disputes the claim that government can keep medical costs down if it was given enough market power:

Consider the Pentagon, a huge monopoly that in theory must have more market power than just about any buyer in any market. You think the Pentagon keeps down the costs of its procurements? Procurement officers pass through the revolving doors of the military-industrial complex and join defense contractors. Politicians, government bureaucrats and the industry are one loving family.

The medical-industrial complex works in a similar way. Behind the rhetoric of helping consumers one can discern a scheme to re-distribute resources from the rest of the economy to healthcare, with its powerful interests. Put that way, it does not sound so nice. You could see the expansion of medical entitlements as a payback to campaign donors.

The Washington Post recently reported that an “employer mandate,” proposed by many Democrats as a way to pay for health reform, could “raise $300 billion over a 10-year period.” This massive new tax would devastate the economy and put millions of Americans out of work.